[Stoves] Acid rain playbook with a page for stoves

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Friends

The acid rain scare a generation ago introduced something new: emissions trading with a cap to keep the price up and the total emission of SO2 down.

This obviously has a parallel now with carbon trading, talk of Cap and Trade (same name as before) and an assessed (EPA) social cost of carbon of $51 initially, now re-calculated down (with an EPA 7% discount rate instead of 3%) to $1 per ton. I have often warned stove project designers to ensure they can run without carbon dioxide offset money. At $1 per ton of CO2 that is not going to encourage much, and that is before offsetting the negative with a positive. I read today that the social benefit of carbon in the USA is about $15 trillion per year.

So, how will the carbon trade that funds stoves play out? I expect it will be the same as the SO2 emissions story. It turns out that the SO2 story was pumped up, flossed, or in modern parlance, fake news.  The parallels with the current money-making scheme is uncanny.

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Climate Alarmists Use the Acid-Rain Playbook

The parallels between the two environmental frenzies are many, but the stakes are much higher now.

By Rupert Darwall, WSJ, Oct 25, 2017

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-alarmists-use-the-acid-rain-playbook-1508969822

SUMMARY: The author of “Green Tyranny:” writes:

A majority of scientists might say a scientific theory is true, but that doesn’t mean the consensus is reliable. The science underpinning environmental claims can be fundamentally wrong—as it was in one of the biggest environmental scares in recent decades.

 The acid-rain alarm of the 1970s and ’80s was a dry run for the current panic about climate change. Both began in Sweden as part of a war on coal meant to bolster support for nuclear power. In 1971 meteorologist Bert Bolin wrote the Swedish government’s report on acid rain to the United Nations. Seventeen years later he became the first chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

 There are many parallels between acid rain and global warming. Each phenomenon produced a U.N. convention—the 1979 Geneva Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution in the case of acid rain, and the 1988 Framework Convention on Climate Change. And each convention led to a new protocol—the 1985 Helsinki Protocol and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Public alarm surrounding acid rain was far more intense, especially in Germany, where popular reaction to media stories about acid rain reached a pitch of hysteria not yet seen with global warming. A 1981 Der Spiegel cover story featured an image of smokestacks looming over a copse of trees with the title “The Forest Is Dying.”

 “The most striking parallels are the role of scientific consensus in underpinning environmental alarm and the way science is used to justify cuts in emissions. The emission of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere “has proved to be a major environmental problem,” Bolin wrote in his 1971 report. National scientific academies across North America and Europe were in complete agreement. “We have a much more complete knowledge of the causes and consequences of acid deposition than we have for other pollutants,” a report by the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council said in 1981. According to the NRC, the circumstantial evidence was “overwhelming.” Many thousands of lakes had been affected, rivers were losing salmon, fisheries in the Adirondacks were in a bad way, red spruce were dying, and production from Canadian sugar maple trees had been affected. Acid rain was a scientific slam dunk.

 “Politicians duly parroted what the scientists told them. “Acid rain has caused serious environmental damage in many parts of the world,” President Jimmy Carter wrote in his 1979 environmental message to Congress. He signed an agreement with Canada to establish five acid-rain working groups, and Congress set up a 10-year National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program, which went by the catchy acronym Napap.

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If you need to read more do so, but my point was congruency, not details.

It turns out that SO2 was a fertilizer and farmers are having to add more S and N because the rain no longer brings it to US farms.



A deeper analysis is contained in a 2013 paper by Prof Philip Lloyd here<http://www.erc.uct.ac.za/sites/default/files/image_tool/images/119/jesa/24-2jesa-lloyd.pdf>.



Reassessment of the environmental impacts of sulphur oxide emissions from power stations
Abstract
It is a deeply entrenched belief that emissions of sulphur
dioxide into the atmosphere are harmful to the
environment, and that sulphur compounds should be
removed from the gaseous wastes before discharge.
The difficulties with this view are summarised.
Extensive work in both North America and Europe
has failed to demonstrate any of the early claims for
impacts such as forest death. The claims for health
effects seem unduly conservative and not supported
by reliable data. There are even negative impacts
from reducing sulphur emissions. Claims for high
external costs associated with coal-fired power generation
in South Africa are the result of arithmetic
errors. The installation of flue-gas desulphurisation
on the latest Eskom power station, Kusile, is shown to
be completely unsustainable in the light of the minimal

benefits that the considerable costs will bring.

Regards

Crispin



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